How To Optimize Your Site For Better Search Engine Ranking
filed under: Website Optimization
As a business owner or organizational leader, you’re undoubtedly concerned with how best to promote your business or organization online. Search engine optimization (a.k.a. SEO) refers to a variety of strategies and actions that you can take to help your website show up more prominently in search engine results. SEO is an essential tool for any business that wants to succeed online.
By understanding what SEO is and how it works, you can put yourself in a much better position to achieve your online goals. But, if you’re a little fuzzy on exactly why it’s important and where to start, the subject might feel a bit overwhelming. You’re not alone.
There’s a ton of information out there about SEO. We’re not aiming to answer all of your questions or give you everything you need to know. Instead, we’re going to share a few key points that will be helpful to keep in mind when thinking about SEO and designing an SEO strategy.
Why SEO?
At its most basic level, SEO is all about making your website more visible to Google and other search engines
SEO is important because research shows that more than half of consumers use a search engine to research things before they buy them. It’s also important because website traffic that comes from organic search (ie, people clicking on your website link in search results) is often one of the bigger sources of traffic for organizations and businesses.
The basic building blocks of a good website are also good for SEO
When you’re building a new website, your potential website users should be top of mind. You want to build something that gets them the information they need or helps them take particular actions on your website quickly and easily. The site should be well-structured and easy to navigate. It also needs to load quickly and shouldn’t have any performance issues that slow it down or make things cumbersome for users.
Just like your users, search engines also like well-structured sites that don’t have performance issues bogging them down. So taking good care of your website users will also help you build a good foundation for SEO.
Keyword research: your secret (not-so-secret) weapon
Keyword research is one of the fundamentals of SEO. It’s important because, as Tim Soulo of Ahrefs says: keyword research is the only way to figure out what people are typing into search engines. You need to know this to avoid creating content about things that nobody is searching for.
In your research, you want to find the terms that your website users are using in their searches and also do your best to understand the search intent of those users. (Just like it sounds, search intent is the type of information a user is looking for in their search…for example, are they mainly looking for information? Or perhaps they’re wanting to buy something and are looking for a deal?)
There are lots of how-tos out there about doing keyword research (this is a good one from Ahrefs) so we’re not going to get into that here. Likewise, there are lots of options for keyword research tools (a good free one is Google Keyword Planner), or you can get help from a pro to do keyword research for you.
Once you’ve found the keywords to target, you can start incorporating them into your website content. You’ll want to target specific keywords on specific pages on your site and you’ll need to include them in metadata fields (like title tags, meta descriptions, etc.), as well as the content that your users are viewing on your site.
High-quality content is a must for SEO
Pages must be well written and have substantial quality. That’s what Search Engine Land’s SEO Periodic Table has to say about page content and “quality” is one of the items with the highest score of +5 on the periodic table.
Search engines want to return the best, most relevant results for people and publishing high-quality content on your website helps them do that.
One way to think about this is by using what is referred to as the E-A-T guidelines when creating content. E-A-T is one way that Google evaluates the quality of content: E-A-T = Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.. ie, content should:
- Be created by an expert.
- Be posted on an authoritative site.
- Be trustworthy.
- Be updated regularly.
Don’t worry if you don’t consider yourself to be an expert in your field yet, or your site isn’t the highest authority in your field. Just focus on publishing good quality content that will be relevant to your potential users.
All of the points we've covered are important for building a strong SEO foundation for your website. Keyword research is essential to understand what users are searching for and how they’re searching, high-quality content is key to providing value and relevance to your users, and making sure your website is well-structured and easy to navigate will keep both your users and search engines happy. If you can focus on creating quality content that meets the needs of your target audience, you’ll be well on your way to improving your SEO ranking.
Ready to jump into an SEO strategy or improve your current strategy? Contact us today.